How can I change the mouse's wheel scroll rate?

Question

I'm using Chrome, and the scroll rate is like 3 lines, and it's painfully slow. My finger gets tired really quickly on long pages. System → Preferences → Mouse lacks any scroll wheel configuration options.

Answer 1

I wanted to do this too, and I figure I most often want to do it in a web browser (where else do you really mouse-wheel scroll a great deal?)

For Google Chrome, add --scroll-pixels=150 to your shortcut to Chrome, or startup script, etc.

i.e.:

/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome --scroll-pixels=150

I found 150 to be a good scroll amount but you could even make it higher for extreme scrolling.

For Firefox, do this:

① In the url field, type about:config.

② Scroll down to “mousewheel.withnokey.sysnumlines”. Double-click the line to set the value to “false”.

③ Double-click the line “mousewheel.withnokey.numlines”, and set it to a number you like.

Answer 2

The fix for me for this (I had it for months) was pretty surreal and like most folks I didn't believe it until I did it:

Some MS mice have a scrollwheel bug.

Try unplugging the USB cable / dongle then plug back in.

Also, I noticed that if you have the dongle plugged in to the computer and the mouse has an on-off mechanism then you can just turn the mouse off and back on. That resets the data link between the mouse and dongle.

:)

Answer 3

From triaged bug #619403 on mouse-wheel acceleration against xorg-server with a link to this patch you can see there is work in progress.

In addition there is a Wiki on how to configure input devices that gives you ideas on what is possible at present:

Use xinput to show setting of your input devices:

xinput --list gives you information on your hardware xinput query-state "name of device" lists the current settings (including mouse wheel!)

Only after you know how your mouse is set up you are able to change these setting using xinput with the option appropriate for your device.

Answer 4

For people using Unity, you can find your lens shortcut in:

cd /usr/share/applications
gedit chromium-browser.desktop 

Answer 5

This was also annoying me.

This following is one option quoted verbatim from a comment here

Begin Quote:

sudo apt-get install imwheel

place the following in ~/.imwheelrc

"^google-chrome$"
  None, Up, Button4, 2
  None, Down, Button5, 2

(replace 2 by the number you want to multiply scrolling by)

$ imwheel

End Quote:

• I added imwheel to my startup applications
• I found the mutliplier 2 to be about right.

Update: I found that the following option actually disabled Ctrl+Scroll to zoom, which I quite like.

Answer 6

Please note unfortunately --scroll-pixels is deprecated and removed from Chrome and Chromium. This flag has not effect on scroll speed.

More details here: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=154776